Andrea Modica

Description

In all of Andrea Modica’s photographs something is slightly askew. The full activity of every frame is never entirely revealed, nor ever completely concealed. Focus shifts from back to front and side to side. Hands obscure faces, and torsos stretch out of the frame or only appear in the background as distant details. Even when she abandons the devices of framing and focus to throw us off center, she can achieve the same results with the clarity of her juxtapositions, like the image of a young boy holding the severed tail of a goat. In these moments, and they occur throughout her work, Modica creates open-ended narratives where fact and fiction are merged and blurred in order to show us the rough edges of experience where uncertainty and caution meet anticipation and hope.

Andrea Modica lives in Philadelphia, PA and works as a photographer and professor of photography at Drexel University. After receiving her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1985, she was professor in the Art Department at the State University of New York College at Oneonta for 13 years. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France. Modica’s photograph’s have been exhibited extensively and published in three monographs: Minor League (Smithsonian Insitution Press, 1993), Treadwell (Chronicle Books, 1996), Human Being (Nazraeli, 2001), Fountain (Stinehour Press, 2004), As We Wait (L’Artiere Editions, 2015, 2016) and January 1 (L’Artiere Editions, 2018). Modica participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 1993.